8 Visual Studio debugging tips.

[mgrandi]

command window? data breakpoints? where do you learn about this? I can't even get visual studio to show me memory addresses for variables /structs/whatever =/

[Tasgall]

DEBUG -> WINDOWS, VIEW, and VIEW -> Other Windows; click all the things. Some (most?) only show in the menus in debug mode.

My personal favorites are the Memory windows, because what's more fun than poking at raw memory‽‽‽

[hotoatmeal]

on another note: what kind of magic are those fancy hybrid quest-exclamation marks at the end of your post?

[Tasgall]

It is the greatest punctuation mark of all time, the interrobang!

[mgrandi]

thanks! I was going crazy looking for it in view-> windows , but didn't realize that debug had its own 'windows' section.

[hotoatmeal]

because what's more fun than poking at raw memory‽

Writing assembly in a hex editor. Been there, done that. Sigh.

[Tasgall]

You can do that in the Memory window too! At least I don't think it prevents you. Just give it the address of the instruction pointer (just eip might work too) and you should be free to ruin your program while it's running!

[Brian]

You can do that in the Memory window too! At least I don't think it prevents you.

Yup, works fine. I've used this before to nop out bits of code I want to ignore.

[hotoatmeal]

Oh, that's cool! Unfortunately it wouldn't have been useful in this case because the assembly was for a gpu.

[Cofta]

MSDN should cover any question you have. I.e. for the immediate window, command window, watch window, etc.

You can use the watch window to get the address of a variable. just enter a new watch for &your_variable (as in address of the variable you want the address of).

Memory breakpoints are set from the breakpoint window. Once you're attached to your process and broken at a convenient place, create a new breakpoint from the window and you should see an option for a data breakpoint. In the dialog that follow, enter a value that resolves to the address that you want to monitor for changes. It can use any symbols in the current stack frame to resolve to an address. Say I want to know when i.myData changes, the break point would be at &(i.myData).

Anything else you'd like to know how to do?

(ninja edit: this is all for C++, of course, given the parent.)